Honors Anthropology and the Four Rs

Abstract

This article is a precis of an honors introductory cultural anthropology course taught for the first time in the spring of 1987 at California State University, Chico. Sixteen superior students in that course helped me refine my methods for teaching it. While standard introductory cultural anthropology at Chico is designed to familiarize students with the basic premises of our discipline and provide exposure to several cultural systems, the honors course goes beyond this and includes a substantial writing component and strategies to assist students in development of their critical thinking skills. It also helps students learn something about the theoretical bases of the discipline and, where practical, provides opportunities to do some analysis. In order to meet the goals of the honors curriculum, as well as my own personal goals of teaching, the crux of my honors course is what I call the four Rs: recruitment, relevance, reinforcement, and responsibility. They provide a structure for both teaching and learning. While not mutually exclusive, I will discuss them in order. In practice, however, reinforcement, relevance, and responsibility are so intertwined that it is sometimes impossible to untangle them. Recruitment